JT: The Iraq War is shaping up as the biggest story of the decade and the mainstream media has consistently botched it. Why?

DS: Americans were getting a uniformity of perspective, an acceptance of government claims as truth. Jingoism replaced journalism. There was more selling than telling. The reason for this was the post 9-11 environment. There was a lot of palpable fear in the country that was re-enforced by the President's policies. What emerged was a patriotic correct coverage. The news went down that slippery slope from being an independent watchdog to being a lapdog of government information.

During the Afghan War, there was tension between the press and the military because the military was not giving the press access. they were employing minders, limiting access, trying to control everything. Some people in the press took umbrage to that and began to be more assertive and aggressive. This led to some tension where at one point a U.S. soldier put a gun to the head of a journalist and said he was going to kill him if he crossed this line.

The government got a little nervous about this and decided to experiment with the idea of integrating the media people into the military. They did that in two operations in Afghanistan called Operation Anaconda and Operation Mountain Lion where limited numbers of journalists were embedded. What happened was that the coverage that had been negative suddenly became very positive. The reporters bonded with the soldiers, began to feel the soldiers were their friends.

As the war in Iraq developed, there was this process of seduction where immediate demands for access became the basis of the embedding program--more than 600 journalists were embedded. Independent coverage was discouraged by the Pentagon and in some instances independent journalists were killed by so-called friendly fire.

Meanwhile inside the Pentagon, the military began to develop this very sophisticated information warfare strategy called IO--Information Operations. They began to more tightly control their information and convert it into key message points like a message of the day strategy.

They built the Coaliton Media Center in Doha. They fed journalists with video tapes, with coffee and the story of the day. In this way, they were able to keep the media following the same story. If you left that media center, your competition would have a story you didn't have. It was a masterful effort at orchestrating information and a political message. There were actually members of the Bush administration who were infiltrated almost like commissars into the Doha Media Center and elsewhere to manage reporters, to try and control what the story was.

As a consequence, coverage was very positive in the beginning days of the war. It was identical on almost all the channels. You had the same message. For news organizations, war is a chance to show your stuff. Most people get ahead in the media through two routes. One is war and one is entertainment. War also builds ratings. There is a sense of palpable danger. It's excitement. It's "what's going to happen to our boys?"

All these themes make for "news immersion"--intense viewing. When that happens, it's a chance for networks to make a lot of money because their ratings go up. They're competing on one hand and collaborating on the other. They made a deal that they would share all the good footage of bombs. They bought Al Jazeera's footage and stripped it of its narratives. What "WMD" goes into is how the government and the media ended up working in lockstep with each other. The watchdog function of media became a lapdog function.

JT: It's a career opportunity...

DS: Partly. It's also dangerous and having the idea that the military is going to protect them is also a very attractive option.

The coverage basically was all about us. It's about what Americans are saying, what Americans are doing. It's about our boys in the field. It's about inside the military. Embed journalists weren't really able to see the bigger picture. A lot of the coverage was micro-coverage--the 2nd Unit of the 3rd Cav of the 4th Army. Alot of these guys began speaking in military jargon. It was like the Stockholm Syndrome. If you're an unarmed person and you get put into a group of armed people, you begin to identify with them because your personal safety is at stake. All these dynamics made for a very sanitized coverage that was useful to the American government.

JT: What was the rest of the world seeing that we weren't seeing?

DS: If you lived in the Arab World, you saw a lot more of the impact of war, of what happens to people when their house is bombed, what happens to children in the hospital, what happens to people being targeted with cluster bombs or depleted uranium.

In America, what you saw was strategic stuff. The weapons systems were lovingly described--MOAB, the Mother Of All bombs, etc. and so forth. You had government-provided footage and graphics showing you these weapons. It was divorced from the impact they have in the real world. In Europe, there was a lot of policy debate going on. All over the world, there was a media war alongside the armed conflict. One was fought with journalists, the other with soldiers.

JT: The Pentagon won that media war in the U.S. but fared poorly in much of the rest of the world.

DS: They tried to propagandize the Middle East with TV stations and radio networks they created. But they were done so poorly, people rejected it. Al Jazeera became a major news brand as the result of its coverage of the war. CNN, I reveal in the film, had two units covering the war, one for domestic consumption and a totally different one for international consumption because they knew the American narrative did not play in the rest of the world.

JT: Describe the trajectory of American journalism over the past 20 or 30 years.

DS: Downward. What's happening is there has not only been media consolidation of big companies merging with each other but a merger of news business and show business so that entertainment values increasingly influence journalistic values. One word that was introduced during the war was "militainment"--military entertainment using high production values to make it dramatic, using familiar narratives. Jessica Lynch--the damsel in distress. Saddam the evildoer. Bush the white knight. Our media basically follows what's called Hollywood narrative technique, which is storytelling. In storytelling, you simplify things. You don't make it dense with information. The people on the Left, we like information. We like analysis. We like facts. They like images. They like characters. They like personalities. They like to put something in a frame that's not too hard to think about.

JT: Why are you coming out with the film now? The election has passed and Bush says the "accountability moment" is over.

DS: We made the film before the election. I'm a journalist who is enraged by the destruction of journalism. In this war, we saw the American media system becoming a state media system like the systems we had grown up opposing. We had said the difference between us and them is that we have a free press and they don't--they have a government-controlled media. What we are becoming is the mirror image of what we had opposed--government controlled media. There is a stunning lack of consciousness of this in the media system. They thought they were doing a great job. Look at the dangers, the embedded reporters, the new technolgies. They were giving each other awards for the best coverage, the best shots and all the rest.

I joined the media to spotlight the problems of the world. And I came to see the media is one of the problems but is not acknowledged as such. When you look at who has power in America, most people see the government and Bush and say, "He's the enemy!" So we had a lot of Bush-bashing films and a lot of making fun of him--"Lying Liars" and so forth. I see institutional power and corporate power as more important and that's who really controls things in our country. The media is an expression of that corporate power. Corporate media reflects the values and the ideology of the people in power. They frame what we hear, what we see and what we don't see.

JT: What is that ideology?

DS: It's the ideology of American power, of American beneficance in the world. It's an ideology that basically says the country should be run by this elite. It's profoundly anti-Democratic.

I felt that America had become a media-ocracy. Most of our candidates spend most of their time raising money to be in the media. MoveOn is the same way--raising money to get commercials on the air. That re-enforces the media system. What I see is that the media system has to be challenged. It was out of that concern I started mediachannel.org in 2000. As I began studying and writing about the media, along comes this war. And I believe it was the most serious crisis journalism has ever confronted.

We can't change America unless we change the media. This requires a straegy on several different levels.First, understanding how media works and helping people decode it and become critical readers and viewers. Second, we need media activism to challenge media monopolies and concentration. Third, we need to create our own media, become the media. I think that's what Indymedia started out to do. "WMD" is a part of this effort to use our skills as mediamakers to challenge this dominant media narrative.

JT: How much of the current state of affairs in journalism can be blamed on the media and how much on the fact that many Americans seem to prefer myths and lies instead of hard truth?

DS:When the American people are surveyed about media, 70 percent express dissatisfaction for various reasons. When I grew up, people like Walter Cronkite (former anchor of the CBS Evening News) were the most trusted men in America. There was tremendous respect for journalists. Today, journalists have very little respect in society because of this growing hostility to the media.

Inside the media, 70 percent of the people are very critical and unhappy. Their work gets censored and suppressed. They ahve to do stupid stories, stories they don't believe in. They feel like they're being managed and controlled.

So, on the one hand people watch what their is to watch. And increasingly, lots of them are not watching the news. Ted Turner says four times as many people watch the Cartoon Network as his news network. Why? Because the news doesn't have credibility. The way it's presented is a tune-out and a turn-off to alot of people.

JT: Yes, but many of Bush's flaw and deceptions were exposed over the last year-and-a-half and on Election Day 59 million people voted for him. In many cases they seemed to be willfully ignorant of his record.

DS: But how was Bush successful? He built on and was re-enforced by the storyline that was used during the war. And that's why he clung to it. Their polling suggested not only did people accept the essential outlines of it but that many people went beyond even what he was saying. Why? Because of impressions they had. Insinuation.

The information environment has been transformed. The Bush people understand it and help shape it with this information warfare strategy. And they're still using it. What word was used most during the State of the Union address?--"Iraq" was used more than anything else. Why do you think they created that whole scene with the military family? In the same way he wants to "personalize" Social Security accounts, he wants to personalize the war. So, the war is really about this family and their child who made the Supreme Sacrifice. You're not really supporting the war. You're supporting them. This is a very clever strategy in the media to displace people's concerns from the policy to the people. This kind of thing works and that's why they are doing it.

What did we see on the other side? We had Kerry moving to the right of Bush. He didn't challenge the narrative. He tried to embrace it and say he could handle it better than they could.

JT: Do you think the media will do any better of a job if Bush leads the nation into more wars in his second term?

DS: You asked, "Why did you make this film? The election is over." However, the problem we're facing isn't about an election or an event but a set of institutions. When you look at coverage of the Iraq elections, everybody was showing very positive, upbeat footage. Nobody was asking, "What were they actually voting for? Why did they vote?"

What they were voting for was to get the Americans out. They were voting against the Occupation. That's what they all said. Even Allawi said that. But, that wasn't reported here. What was reported here was this vindication of Bush's policy and the media let him get away with that. The same appraoch I documented in WMD is still going on til this day. That's why the film is still timely and relevant.

I believe no matter what your issue is, media has to be your second issue. If your issue is not on television and people don't know about it, they're not going to make it their issue. We have to get our concerns shared by the American people.

"WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" is currently showing at Village East Theatre on 2nd and 12th St. and at New Metro Theatre at 100th and Broadway. http://www.wmdthefilm.com http://www.mediachannel.org